Haumea

You might have seen an interesting phrase popping up in your social media feeds lately: "Chiron is in retrograde." If you're anything like me, you've never heard of Chiron before—and I'm a professional astronomer.

What processes during the formation of Pluto's largest moon, Charon, potentially led to it having cryovolcanism, and even an internal ocean? This is what a recent study presented at the 56th Lunar and Planetary Science Conference (LPSC 2025) hopes to address as a team of researchers investigated the formation and evolution of Charon to ascertain whether it once possessed an internal ocean during its history and if this could have led to cryovolcanism based on images obtained by NASA's New […]

For centuries, astronomers have sought to understand the formation and evolution of the solar system and the dynamics that govern it. In particular, there is the long-standing question of whether or not the planets' orbits will remain stable over time. However, these studies have generally treated the solar system as an isolated system, focusing solely on the gravitational interactions between the planets. This is in spite of the fact that astronomers have known for some time that stars in the […]

The mystery of how Pluto got a giant heart-shaped feature on its surface has finally been solved by an international team of astrophysicists led by the University of Bern and members of the National Center of Competence in Research (NCCR) PlanetS. The team is the first to successfully reproduce the unusual shape with numerical simulations, attributing it to a giant and slow oblique-angle impact.

The Kuiper Belt, the vast region at the edge of our solar system populated by countless icy objects, is a treasure trove of scientific discoveries. The detection and characterization of Kuiper Belt Objects (KBOs), sometimes referred to as Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), has led to a new understanding of the history of the solar system.